Marketing – the tool used to sway consumers’ power of choice – is also one of the mainstays of the anti-choice movement. It’s becoming increasingly common to see fetuses, ranging from cute to horrific, polluting the landscape. Whether it be on billboards, bus stops, park benches or even water bottles, it’s difficult to escape the pervasive guilt trip placed on pregnant women. Some have gone to surprising extremes. The state of North Carolina offers an anti-choice license plate, which if nothing else, could be a good weapon against tailgating. A dry cleaner in Cincinnati either has a cruel sense of irony or they are completely oblivious in their insistence of hanging every piece of clothing on an anti-choice coat hanger. That’s right – a coat hanger.

While North Carolina spared their citizens the dead fetus imagery, a judge has ruled that the license plate, a rainbow-colored, childlike drawing of two racially diverse children, is unconstitutional, at least until the state offers a pro-choice version.

U.S. District Court Judge James C. Fox ruled on Friday that North Carolina cannot produce or distribute the “Choose Life” plate.

Judge Fox concluded, “The State’s offering of a Choose Life license plate in the absence of a pro-choice plate constitutes viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina Legal Foundation had filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina in Sept. 2011 on behalf of North Carolinians seeking a specialty license plate that supports a woman’s right to reproductive freedom.

North Carolina is just one of 27 states offering the “choose life” license plates. Only four states offer pro-choice plates. Pro-choice groups have approached the state, only to be turned down by the North Carolina Legislature.

A dry cleaner in Cincinnati isn’t giving their customer any sort of choice, other than to take their business elsewhere. Their cleaning comes with a bonus, a coat hanger complete with anti-choice propaganda.

Before 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that what a woman does with her body, at least in the case of abortion, was a matter of privacy, abortions were still a common occurrence, but they were forced underground. If a woman could afford it, she could find a disreputable doctor to terminate her pregnancy. If she couldn’t afford the $1,000 plus price tag, she often felt forced to resort to extreme measures, such as coat hangers. In those dark ages of illegal abortions, “coat hanger” abortions resulted in as many as 5,000 deaths per year. One would think that coat hangers, a reminder of why we should never go back to the pre-Roe vs. Wade dark ages would be the last thing anti-choicers would want to associate themselves with, but Springdale Cleaners seems not to care, especially since they’ve apparently had the hangers since at least 2010.

Attempts to reach Springdale Cleaners were unsuccessful, however, you can contact them through their website.

Author: Wendy GittlesonPolitical pundit, small business marketing guru, business blogger -- a true renaissance woman, which apparently makes her really old.
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